Solzhenitsyn. Havel. Bonhoeffer. Kolakowski. These names are forever lionized in the pantheon of noble dissidents. And rightfully so. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn catalogued the heinous abuses of the Soviet labor camp experience in his greatest work, The Gulag Archipelago. Vaclav Havel endured isolation and harassment as an outspoken playwright who penned the razor-sharp analysis of life under oppressive Czech Communist stooges in his essay The Power of the Powerless. Dietrich Bonhoeffer helped found a Protestant Confessing Church objecting to the Nazification of his former denomination. He then went on to write his seminal work, The Cost of Discipleship, which objected to “cheap grace” in the face of times demanding suffering for Christian truth. And Leszek Kolakowski championed and brilliantly articulated why Marxism was philosophically robust and defensible, only to realize that this simply was not true. In writing his magisterial intellectual indictment of the Communist enterprise, The Main Currents of Marxism, he upheld his intellectual honesty and moral center which led his overseers to strip him of his titles, deprive him of his livelihood and threaten his safety. Consequently, he became the exiled intellectual godfather of the Solidarity movement which first fissured and cracked the edifice of Soviet Communism. How on earth could anyone expect to stand equally in the company of such courageous men? And where would you find them?

Let me say the last place I anticipated finding such a man was the theater. But there he was. In August, 1941, young Karol Wojtyla found himself nearly one year into the Nazi’s brutal occupation of Poland. In this short span of time, Wojtyla was forced to quit his University studies, witness his professors and priests sent to concentration camps, work tirelessly in a limestone quarry and chemical plant and, finally, endure the untimely death of his father. And yet in the increasingly hellish killing fields of Nazi racial hygiene, Wojtyla would not opt for fearful passivity. He would become part of a reassembled underground university. He would become a member of “The Living Rosary” serving as a leader of fifteen men charged to live the life of incessant prayer and selfless devotion modeled after St. John of the Cross. And, finally, Karol Wojtyla would act.

A blockbuster news event happened earlier this week. One that ought to have caused outrage in all political quarters. One that ought to have made us question not only the Obama administration’s competence, but also their motives. How else should we explain $500 million in arms that the United States facilitated to al-Qaeda linked groups in Libya? How else to explain the sudden shift in a decade and a half-long War on Terror from waging merciless war against the terrorist group that felled the Twin Towers and killed 3,000 Americans to becoming their sugar daddy on the shores of Tripoli?

On April 22nd, a group of retired intelligence professionals, generals and admirals called the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi strode to the microphones in front of members of the press to announce the results of their interim report. They interviewed informants and witnesses. They collected hundreds of documents. And their results were unequivocal: America blundered itself into a war of choice by allying with al-Qaeda.

And yet if you had been watching CNN or your network nightly news, you wouldn't have the faintest idea. If you were waiting for feckless Republicans on Capitol Hill to comment, let alone do something, you’d still be waiting.

This is our upside-down world. A bipartisan code of silence has been struck between John Boehner and Barack Obama. Thousands of guns and weapons were handed over to the enemy, and now we are supposed to feign surprise and shock that the September 11th, 2012 attacks in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans were killed. It’s still unclear who knew what, when. But where are the voices calling for a permanent select committee with subpoena power to bring Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, John Brennan and the administration’s top intelligence and diplomatic officials to account.

Surely one would think that if we agreed on anything, it would be that in the post 9/11 world al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates are our nation’s enemies. But apparently not. Whether out of indifference or malice, the United States sided with al-Qaeda in Libya. It’s as if the ATF set up a branch in Benghazi and started funneling guns to the enemy, much as they did with drug cartels along the Mexican border.

Another important nugget was buried in the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi report, and covered up by members of the media desperate for Hillary Clinton to run for the presidency, unscathed by trivial matters like Benghazi. The entire Libyan war could have been avoided. That’s right. Muammar Gaddafi had offered to abdicate peacefully and turn over power, thus avoiding bloodshed and war.

A former admiral, Chuck Kubic was working those negotiations between the U.S. and Libyan military chains of command before he was told to step aside by Washington. Gaddafi wanted only two conditions to step down: permission to keep fighting al-Qaeda and the removal of sanctions against him. The Obama administration was uninterested in peace. They turned down the offer to broker a peaceful exit for the Libyan strongman. And thus months of bloodshed, culminating in the attack on the consulate in Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton would like us all to drop the B-word from our vocabulary. She and her spinmeisters have convinced the press to do exactly that. Reporters who have tried to cover it, reporters such as Lara Logan and Sharyl Attkisson, have been demoted and fired. They’ve been told by their senior editors that Benghazi is old news. That it’s a partisan agenda cooked up by Republicans to hurt Hillary. If that were true, why aren’t more Republicans speaking up?

We need more truth. We need more people digging out the facts. Even if our elected leaders won’t do it, even if our betters in the mainstream media won’t do it, we must.

Friday, April 25, 2014

We have about two and a half years of distance from the beginning of the Sandusky saga that tarnished Joe Paterno’s reputation and sent Penn State and the town in which the university is housed headlong into an existential crisis that it’s still sorting through.

I’ve spent the afternoon reading through Michael Weinreb’s numerouspieces on the subject, because they were written by someone who grew up on Paterno lore and who thought State College was an exceptional place before the bad news broke. Like most people, I lack that perspective. I spent my formative years nowhere near central Pennsylvania. What I saw when Jerry Sandusky’s transgressions came to light — and then as the Freeh report confirmed that, yes, JoePa had known about them and took pains to make them go away — was straightforwardly abhorrent hypocrisy. I was angry and a little saddened, but I didn’t feel it in my bones.

Weinreb saw the utter demolition of an ideal he had believed in for decades. He wrote in a post-Freeh report blog post: “now that Paterno is gone, his last best chance to reform big-time college football is to be remembered as one of the worst villains the sport has ever known.” That’s the sort of acidic repudiation you’re going to get only from someone who is close enough to the situation to feel betrayed.

I’ve been consulting Weinreb’s work because some folks in State College are trying to fund a new Joe Paterno statue, and I’m trying to understand what they’re thinking. Even if Weinreb rejected Paterno as both a man and a symbol in the wake of the scandal, there’s a lot in his articles that explains why Penn Staters and State College residents would still feel affection for JoePa. To oversimplify, the story of those who cling to Paterno’s defiled saintdom is the story of people who can’t decouple values they hold dear from a person who was supposed to practice them absolutely. That JoePa-as-paterfamilias stuff you hear from Paterno truthers is troubling, but it’s not fiction. In the minds of many, he stood — and continues to stand — for something, even if in reality, he didn’t stand for much.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to anchor yourself with ideals, the sensible thing to do, now that we know Paterno was cravenly cynical in trying to protect his football program, would be to go on believing in all the noble things the JoePa hagiography complex purported him to embody, but to leave the man behind. Of course, doing the sensible thing can be quite difficult.

The debate over the removal of the first Paterno statue was pretty beside-the-point in comparison to all the other moral quandaries Penn State and State College were grappling with at the time, but removing it was the right call. A statue of anyone is, at best, a dumb form of history, and one of a pedophile defender is considerably worse. Even if Paterno was everything his disciples thought he was, you don’t need a human being to stand in for All That Is Good. Anyway, it’s probably more productive for you to discover what goodness is for yourself, without being provided a template.

This new statue doesn’t really matter, in the way getting rid of the old one didn’t matter. It will be, if it gets made, a hunk of metal that some people might deface and others might find comfort in. It will change nothing.

It’s a bad idea regardless. (Even worse is the tone-deaf decision to have JoePa reading Virgil’sAeneid, which has, as is typical of a classic, some brutal rape scenes in it.) It’s indicative of a small-mindedness and an intellectual stubbornness that festers in a who-knows-how-large corner of the community. It is a strange and not-a-little-distasteful answer to the question of what State College and the university that defines it should become, now that it’s clear grave mistakes were made. What mistakes? it replies.

The people who are bent on canonizing Joe Paterno will go on canonizing him, either with bronze or hosannas. They can have their version of Paterno. I suppose they deserve it. It’s up to less blinkered members of the community to do some hard thinking, knowing answers may take a very long time to materialize.

Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court’s ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race.

The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6 to 2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer’s rationale. It couldn’t be simpler. “The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”

Finally. After 36 years since the Bakke case, years of endless pettifoggery — parsing exactly how many spoonfuls of racial discrimination are permitted in exactly which circumstance — the court has its epiphany: Let the people decide. Not our business. We will not ban affirmative action. But we will not impose it, as the Schuetteplaintiffs would have us do by ruling that no state is permitted to ban affirmative action.

The path to this happy place has been characteristically crooked. Eleven years ago, the court rejected an attempt to strike down affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school. The 2003Grutterdecision, as I wrote at the time, was “incoherent, disingenuous, intellectually muddled and morally confused” — and exactly what the country needed.

The reasoning was a mess because, given the very wording of the equal-protection clause (and of the Civil Rights Act), justifying any kind of racial preference requires absurd, often comical linguistic contortions. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his Schuette concurrence, even the question is absurd: “Does the Equal Protection Clause . . . forbid what its text plainly requires?” (i.e., colorblindness).

Indeed, over these four decades, how was“equal protection” transformed into a mandate for race discrimination? By morphing affirmative action into diversity and declaring diversity a state purpose important enough to justify racial preferences.

This is pretty weak gruel when compared with the social harm inherent in discriminating by race: exacerbating group antagonisms, stigmatizing minority achievement and, as documented by Thomas Sowell, Stuart Taylor and many others, needlessly and tragically damaging promising minority students by turning them disproportionately into failures at institutions for which they are unprepared.

So why did I celebrate the hopelessly muddled Grutter decision, which left affirmative action standing?

Because much as I believe the harm of affirmative action outweighs the good, the courts are not the place to decide the question. At its core, affirmative action is an attempt — noble but terribly flawed, in my view — at racial restitution. The issue is too neuralgic, the history too troubled, the ramifications too deep to be decided on high by nine robes. As with all great national questions, the only path to an enduring, legitimate resolution is by the democratic process.

That was the lesson of Roe v. Wade. It created a great societal rupture because, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg once explained, it “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the [abortion] issue.” It is never a good idea to take these profound political questions out of the political arena. (Regrettably, Ginsberg supported the dissent in Schuette, which would have done exactly that to affirmative action, recapitulating Roe.)

Which is why the 2003 Grutter decision was right. Asked to abolish affirmative action — and thus remove it from the democratic process — the court said no.

Schuette completes the circle by respecting the constitutionality of that democratic decision. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the controlling opinion: “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”

And as Breyer wrote: “The Constitution permits, though it does not require . . . race-conscious programs.” Liberal as he is, Breyer could not accept the radical proposition of theSchuette plaintiffs that the Constitution demands — and cannot countenance a democratically voted abolition of — racial preferences.

This gives us, finally, the basis for a new national consensus. Two-thirds of the court has just said to the nation: For those of you who wish to continue to judge by race, we’ll keep making jesuitical distinctions to keep the discrimination from getting too obvious or outrageous. If, however, you wish to be rid of this baleful legacy and banish race preferences once and for all, do what Michigan did. You have our blessing.

I think we all know what Barack Obama’s foreign-policy strategy coming into office was.

Step 1: Be Barack Obama (and not George W. Bush).

Step 2: ????

Step 3: World peace!

(With apologies to South Park.)

As a candidate, Obama held a huge campaign rally in, of all places, Berlin, touting his bona fides as a citizen of the world. The crowd went wild, as he talked at length about a world without walls (you had to be there). As president, in his first major speech abroad, Obama suggested to a Cairo audience that the fact America elected him was all the proof anyone should need that America had turned the page.

It all seems very strange now in retrospect, but in his defense, you can understand how seductive this notion must have been. The whole world — at least the parts of it that Obama listens to — was telling him that replacing George W. Bush with Barack Obama was just the ticket for what ailed the planet. The fervor was all so detached from facts on the ground that the Nobel Committee even gave Obama a Peace Prize for the stuff they were sure he was going to do, eventually. (One clue that Obama’s cult of personality didn’t actually translate into tangible results on the world stage should have been his failure to win the 2016 Olympics for his hometown of Chicago, despite being the first president to personally lobby for it.)

The problem, of course, is that Obama never had a Plan B. He never really thought he’d need one, and besides, he never much cared about foreign policy. Particularly in his first term, his top priority was to keep international problems from distracting from his domestic agenda. He ordered the surge in Afghanistan but then went silent about that war for years. He passive-aggressively let a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq evaporate. Even his controversial policies — targeted killing, drones, etc. — were intended to turn the war on terrorism into a no-drama technocratic affair out of the headlines.

And the killing of Osama bin Laden, his greatest foreign-policy accomplishment (I’m using “his” advisedly), was almost immediately translated into an argument about domestic priorities.

“We obviously think that if there is a takeaway from it,” White House press secretary Jay Carney explained in the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s assassination, “it is the resolve [Obama] has, the focus he brings to bear on long-term objectives, that he keeps pushing to get it done. On immigration reform he keeps pushing . . . ” Blah, blah, blah.

For a verbal pirouette, Carney’s segue had all the subtlety of Chris Farley in a tutu.

The real takeaway from such statements, and from Obama’s whole approach to foreign policy, is that he doesn’t care about it, or he’s afraid of it. He issued a red line in Syria until his bluff was called. He’s let our ally, the Philippines, fend for itself as China tries to annex Scarborough Shoal. He’s made it clear to the Iranians that he considers talking its own reward, since that will likely kick the hard decision about their nuclear program onto the next president’s desk. When Vladimir Putin began his invasion and annexation of Crimea, Obama mumbled a soft denunciation and then hustled downtown to a DNC rally, telling the crowd, “Well, it’s Friday, it’s after 5:00. So this is officially happy hour with the Democratic party.”

Such things are noticed. This is the foreign-policy equivalent of being an ugly American. President Obama is in Japan to assure the increasingly nervous Japanese that we will honor our commitments to them, even as the Chinese become ever-more brazen about filling the vacuum America is leaving behind. This is worthwhile. So is his tardy decision to reassure our increasingly nervous NATO allies in Poland and three Baltic states by sending some token troops for an exercise.

But while these are good and necessary gestures, they are necessary in no small part because it is only now dawning on the president that he should have had a Plan B all along.

RALEIGH — Thursday night, late in his encore at PNC Arena, Bruce Springsteen stripped down to a T-shirt and shucked his guitar, surveying the house as the crowd roared. He bobbed and weaved like a boxer about to enter the ring. Yet another marathon performance was under his belt, and he still looked fit enough to jog to the next city on his tour.

Springsteen will turn 65 in September, retirement age for most people, and you figure he’s got to slow down at some point. But he showed no signs of doing so anytime soon, running through 26 songs in just under three hours.

The E Street Band, Springsteen’s long-time backup ensemble, has gone through plenty of phases and stages over the past 40 years, including the deaths of two members since 2008. The current incarnation that Springsteen presides over is a rock ’n’ roll orchestra, 18 pieces strong, capable of an impressive wall of sound when they hit it at full blare.

One of the band’s most dramatic changes of recent years has been the addition of Tom Morello, guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, who brings an intriguing new dimension to the arrangements. Morello added a healthy dose of jagged-edge skronk to the opening number “High Hopes,” and he turned “The Ghost of Tom Joad” -- a song Springsteen originally recorded as a quietly reflective ballad in the mid-1990s -- into a sprawling guitar faceoff.

Still, if you want to talk E Street Band drama, it all comes down to saxophonist Clarence Clemons, the late great Big Man, who died in 2011 and still casts a long shadow over his former bandmates. During the “Big Man has joined the band” line of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” there was a video-screen tribute to both Clemons and keyboardist Danny Federici (who died in 2008), a gesture that was both moving and classy.

Meanwhile, Clarence’s nephew Jake Clemons has developed into a more-than-capable stand-in for his uncle, playing his solos in a style that honors the original parts without being too slavish about the details. He has also stepped into his uncle’s role as Springsteen’s physical foil, joining him at the center-stage microphone more than once.

Thursday’s show also served as a matriculation party for Springsteen’s daughter Jessica, who he announced is graduating from Duke University. Dad brought his daughter onstage to dance as Jake Clemons played the saxophone solo of “Dancing in the Dark,” which was a very sweet touch.

But the party wasn’t limited to immediate family. The stage setup included a catwalk that bisected the PNC Arena floor, and Springsteen spent a lot of time out in the crowd letting people maul him (and his guitar) and take pictures that are no doubt already all over social media. He brought up a few of his daughter’s friends to sing during “Growin’ Up,” and two very cute little girls for “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day.”

The crowd played its part with the customary unbridled adoration, including song requests via poster-board signs. Springsteen obliged the audience requests with “Brilliant Disguise,” “I’m on Fire” and a cover of Manfred Mann’s 1960s-vintage hit “Pretty Flamingo” (to the delight of his backup-singer wife Patti Scialfa).

Nevertheless, the best moments were the songs you knew he’d play, the ones you’d feel cheated if he left them out. Going on 40 years later, “Born to Run” is still among the most amazing songs in the arena-rock canon, a delirious audience sing-along that was as powerful as always. Same for “Badlands,” “The Promised Land” and “Thunder Road.”

On a more fun and less epic note, the encore cover of the Isley Brothers party standard “Shout” gave Springsteen the perfect venue for making the standard spiel he gives at the end of every show:

A group called the Citizens Commission on Benghazi has come out with a damning report on events and decisions that led up to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead. The commission, which is made up of former high-ranking US military officers, CIA insiders and think-tank fellows, gathered information on Benghazi across seven months. Their investigation included 85 Freedom of Information Act requests as well as contact with current officials who have direct knowledge of US actions during the months prior to the attack.

‘The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,’ Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.
She blamed the Obama administration for failing to stop half of a $1 billion United Arab Emirates arms shipment from reaching al-Qaeda-linked militants.

‘Remember, these weapons that came into Benghazi were permitted to enter by our armed forces who were blockading the approaches from air and sea,’ Lopez claimed. ‘They were permitted to come in. … [They] knew these weapons were coming in, and that was allowed..

‘The intelligence community was part of that, the Department of State was part of that, and certainly that means that the top leadership of the United States, our national security leadership, and potentially Congress – if they were briefed on this – also knew about this.’

The weapons were intended for Gaddafi but allowed by the U.S. to flow to his Islamist opposition.

The commission also says that Islamists attacked the US facility in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, not intending to kill US Ambassador Christopher Steven, but to kidnap him. The attackers intended to grab him and use him to bargain for the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdul Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York.

There is evidence to back up that claim. In the days prior to the attack in Benghazi, unrest rose up in Cairo, Egypt. While the US embassy in Cairo blamed the uprising on a YouTube movie, the real driver behind it was a coalition of Islamist groups. Those groups were not protesting a movie at all. According to the warning they published in Egyptian media, they had a specific demand:

“The group, which consists of many members from al-Qaeda, called [especially] for the quick release of the jihadi [mujahid] sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman [the "Blind Sheikh"], whom they described as a scholar and jihadi who sacrificed his life for the Egyptian Umma, who was ignored by the Mubarak regime, and [President] Morsi is refusing to intervene on his behalf and release him, despite promising that he would. The Islamic Group has threatened to burn the U.S. Embassy in Cairo with those in it, and taking hostage those who remain [alive], unless the Blind Sheikh is immediately released.”

Islamists did attack the US embassy in Cairo on September 11, 2012 — the same day of the attack in Benghazi, Libya. The attackers breached the embassy’s walls and replaced the American flag with the black flag of Islam.

The citizens’ Benghazi commission, which is supported by Accuracy in Media, also criticizes the Obama administration for its handling of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. According to the commission, Gaddafi offered to abdicate shortly after the Islamist uprising against him began. He had two conditions: Permission to continue fighting al Qaeda in Libya, and a lifting of sanctions against him and his family. The Obama administration, according to the commission, was unwilling to help broker a peaceful exit, and instead allowed $500 million of weapons intended for Gaddafi to make its way into the hands of the Islamists. Those Islamists toppled Gaddafi and later, assaulted the US facility in Benghazi.

The Obama administration insists that no US forces could have responded to the assault in Benghazi in time to save the Americans there. The commission says that that is untrue.

[Commission member, Admiral James] Lyons also said U.S. claims that it lacked the resources to mount a counterattack in time to save lives is false.
‘I’m going to tell you that’s not true,’ he said. ‘We had a 130-man unit of forces at Sigonella [AFB in Italy]. They were ready to go.’
‘The flight time from Sigonella to Benghazi is roughly an hour.’

Perhaps most explosively, the commission alleges that the Obama administration’s attempt to blame the attack on a YouTube movie was coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was coordinating Islamist action in Egypt and Libya.

The commission wants a congressional select committee appointed to investigate the Benghazi attack.

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Fidel CastroThe eulogies to Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez upon his death last week make two points official:
1.) No amount of moral and intellectual wretchedness will earn an artist even the mildest rebuke from most of his professional peers and their related institutions—so long as the wretch hires out to communists.

2.) The masochism (to sidestep more “Mc Carthyite” terms) of Democratic U.S. Presidents is boundless.

Not that the media eulogies sidestep Garcia-Marquez’ politics. Most are quite upfront about it. Let’s take the one run by The New York Times as emblematic:

“Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.”

Notice the word “dictator” above. But with whom does the New York Times associate it? Pinochet, of course. Does Fidel Castro also qualify as dictator? The New York Times does not tell us.

“Mr. García Márquez’s ties to Mr. Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates,” continues the NYTimes. “Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, “To me it’s scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world…He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans’ “almost pornographic obsession with Castro.” But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.”

In fact, fully contrary to the New York Times’ whitewash, Garcia Marquez’ “intercession” is what got some of those dissidents jailed and tortured by his friend Castro in the first place. Let’s not mince words. Let’s call out Garcia-Marquez categorically: on top of his decades of pro-bono propaganda services for Castroism, Garcia-Marquez was also a volunteer snitch for Castro’s KGB-mentored secret police.

Here I’ll turn over the floor to someone intimately familiar with the issue Armando Valladares, who himself suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission:

“Many years ago Garcia Marquez became an informer for Castro’s secret police,” starts a recent expose’ by Mr Valladares. “At the time, back in Havana, Cuban dissident and human-rights activist, Ricardo Bofill, with help of the then-reporter for Reuters, Collin McSevengy, managed to enter the Havana hotel where García Márquez was having a few drinks. In a quiet corner, with absolute discretion, Bofill gave García Márquez a series of documents relating to several Cuban artists.

A few weeks later Castro’s police arrested Ricardo Bofill–and displayed on the table right next to Castro’s secret-policeman –were the very documents which Bofill had given Garcia Marquez.”
Bofill, a peaceful human-rights activist inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, went on to suffer 12 years in Castro’s prisons—thanks to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. On October 13, 1968 the Spanish newspapers ABC and Diario 16, published Bofill’s disclosures and headlined that: “García Márquez’ revelations led to the imprisonment of numerous Cuban writers and artists.” Seems all this was all conveniently “forgotten” by most media outlets last week.

But enough from me. Instead let’s hear from some folks much closer to this issue. Let’s hear from Cuban writers who were suffering in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons and torture chambers while Gabriel Garcia-Marquez contributed his literary influence and might towards glorifying their torturer.

The late Reynaldo Arenas’ autobiography Before Night Falls was on the New York Times (no less!) list of the ten best books of the year in 1993. In 2000 the book became a movie starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp and Sean Penn (no less!) Throughout the 70’s Arenas was jailed and tortured by Castro’s police for his rebellious writings and gay lifestyle. He finally escaped on the Mariel boatlift tin 1980. Here’s his take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez from 1982:

“It’s high time for all the intellectuals of the free world (the rest don’t exist) to take a stand against this unscrupulous propagandist for totalitarianism. I wonder why these intellectual apologists for communist paradises don’t live in them? Or is it that they prefer collecting payment there and here, while enjoying the comforts and guarantees of the western world?”

In fact, Garcia-Marquez did live on and off in Cuba, in a (stolen) mansion Castro gifted him, where he frolicked with adolescent girls between traveling through Havana in a (stolen) Mercedes also gifted him by Castro.

“Only a five star-scoundrel would put his literary fame in the service of a cause as vile and malignant as the Castro tyranny. Simple frivolity cannot possibly justify an embrace so long and strong as the one Garcia-Marquez gave someone who devastated a nation, murdered thousands, jailed and tortured tens of thousands dispersed an entire nation and debased the rest.”

Now let’s hear from some people who fate allowed a more detached view of Gabriel Garcia Marquez than Arenas and Luque Escalona: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

“I once had the privilege to meet him in Mexico,” President Obama was quoted in Politico last week, “where he presented me with an inscribed copy that I cherish to this day. As a proud Colombian, a representative and voice for the people of the Americas, and as a master of the ‘magic realism’ genre, he has inspired so many others….I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo’s work will live on for generations to come.”

“I was saddened to learn of the passing of Gabriel García Márquez,” mourned Bill Clinton. “From the time I read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty. I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years.”

Garcia-Marquez shared all of Fidel Castro’s hatred against the U.S., a passion that contributed much to their long and warm friendship. Given this rabid hatred for the nation that elected them, you’d really think–especially given white house speech writing budgets– that these U.S. Presidents could have found a way to express their admiration for Garcia Marquez’ art without so warmly embracing the wretched artist himself.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Why Pope John Paul II, who will be canonized April 27, discerned possibilities when others saw only barriers.

In a March 1996 conversation, Pope John Paul II told me, almost wistfully, "They try to understand me from the outside, but I can only be understood from inside." His tone that evening was less critical than it was bemused, even resigned. But whether his regrets involved biographers who treated him as a globe-trotting politician or journalists who parsed his every word and deed in conventional left-right categories, the view from outside, he knew, was not going to get anyone close to the essence of Karol Wojtyła.

I agreed with him then; and now, nine years after his death, in the days before his April 27 canonization, I agree with him even more. John Paul II, who embodied the human drama of the second half of the 20th century in a singular way, and whose witness to the truth of humanity's noblest aspirations bent the curve of history toward freedom, can only be understood from inside out. Or, if you prefer, soul first.

His was a many-textured soul. Some of its multiple facets help explain his extraordinary accomplishments in the Catholic Church and on the world stage.

He had a Polish soul, formed by a distinctive experience of history. Vivisected in the Third Polish Partition of 1795, his country was not restored to the map of Europe until 1918. But during those 123 years of political humiliation, the Polish nation survived the demise of the Polish state through its language, its literature and its faith, with the Catholic Church acting as the safe-deposit box of national identity.

Learning about that hard experience as a boy, Karol Wojtyla was permanently inoculated against the twin heresies that had beset the West for centuries: the Jacobin heresy that the political quest for power runs history, and the Marxist heresy that history is simply the exhaust fumes of economic processes. Knowing in his Polish soul that culture, not politics or economics, drives history over the long haul, John Paul II could ignite a revolution of conscience during his first papal visit to Poland in 1979. He summoned his people to live the truth about themselves, to reject the communist culture of the lie, and to find in that restored national identity irresistible tools of resistance to oppression.

This son of Poland was, at the same time, a man of global vision with a deeply humanistic soul, forged by what he regarded as the crisis of modernity: a crisis in the very idea of the human person. That crisis, he believed, was not confined to communism's materialist reduction of the human condition, which he tenaciously fought as a university chaplain, a professor of ethics, a charismatic priest and a dynamic bishop. The crisis could also be found in those Western systems that were tempted to measure men and women by their commercial utility rather than by the innate and inalienable dignity that was their birthright.

John Paul II's conviction, biblically rooted and philosophically refined, was that every human life is of infinite value, at every stage and in every condition. This was the basis of hispriestly ministry for almost six decades;it was the conviction that forged his unique moral analysis of world politics; and it was the ground from which he could inspire men and women from a staggering variety of cultures.

He could also touch those lives because of his dramatic soul. As a young man, he confessed in a memoir later in life, he was "obsessed" with the theater. And while he took some useful skills from those experiences on stage— John Gielgud once commented on John Paul II's "perfect" sense of timing, as Alec Guinness marveled at the resonance of his voice—he also developed a dramatic view of the human condition. We all live, he believed, in a quotidian, yet deeply consequential, moral drama. Every day of our lives is lived in the dramatic tension between who we are and who we should be.

John Paul II intuited this on stage; he refined that intuition as a philosopher. And it was deepened by his Christian conviction that the drama of every human life is playing within a cosmic drama in which the God of the Bible is producer, director, scriptwriter and protagonist. That Christian conviction, in turn, was what allowed him to say, a year after he was shot in St. Peter's Square in 1981, "In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences."

A man whose soul is formed by the conviction that "coincidence" is merely a facet of providence that he has not yet grasped is a man impervious to the tyranny of the possible. And here, too, the soul of John Paul II helps explain his accomplishment.

When he was elected pope in 1978, some observers, fixated on what they imagined to be possible, saw in the Catholic Church only contention and possible ruin. He saw seeds of reform and renewal, leading to what he would call a "New Evangelization," a new missionary dynamic in Catholicism that would offer the divine mercy to a broken and wounded humanity. Others, fixated on what seemed settled in world affairs, believed that the Yalta division of Europe after World War II was permanent. But after June 1979 and the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, he saw possibilities for dramatic cultural, social and eventually political change in Eastern Europe—and then helped effect them.

If John Paul II seemed able to discern possibilities where others saw only barriers; if he saw (as he put it at the United Nations in 1995), a "springtime of the human spirit" after a winter of murderous discontent embodied in two world wars, the gulag and Auschwitz—well, one could look to his keen mind for an explanation. But the deeper explanation lies in his soul, and in the human character formed by that soul.

It was John Paul's soul in which hundreds of millions of human beings found an exemplar of decency and an icon of hope. It was the character formed by that soul that made him a champion of resistance against the tyranny of diminished expectations, personal and political.

Mr. Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the author of the two-volume biography of John Paul II, "Witness to Hope" (1999) and "The End and the Beginning" (2010).

Bruce Springsteen played the Easter Bunny this weekend for thousands of his most dedicated fans. Springsteen released 7,500 copies of American Beauty, a four song EP on Record Store Day that will hit the mark with E Street Nation, the nickname he tagged his fandom with.

The EP was released only in vinyl and was on sale for one day only as Springsteen joined Jack White, REM and Devo among others in supporting record stores.

Springsteen’s four tunes were all recorded in the last decade yet never found a place on one of his albums and typical of Springsteen these are not “throw away” songs. They each have a distinct sound to them that at times resemble the different albums they fell short of making.

The title track kicks off side one and features what Springsteen describes as a “guitar wall of sound” gives it a little “exile on E Street’ power,” in one of two rockers on the EP. Side two leads off with ” Hurry Up Sundown,” rich with blue-collar themes that have marked Springsteen’s music since the began recording back in 1973.

“Mary Mary” is a must listen, a song Springsteen refers to as “a lovely mystery, a small piece of heartbreak poetry” that sounds like it is an outcast from the “Devils and Dust” album released in 2005, but Springsteen claims it nearly made the “High Hopes” record.

The highlight of this EP though is “Hey Blue Eyes” with a title that has the listener thinking love song but this tune is anything but. The Boss has penned a political piece aimed directly at the Bush and Cheney era of the White House. “In this house the guilty go unpunished and blood and silence prevail” sings Springsteen referencing Abu Ghraib and the actions there. This dark piece leaves no doubt about the author’s opinion on the matter. It is also the most stripped down song on the record while featuring most of the E Street Band members on it.

E Street fans will take whatever they can get from Springsteen and this small piece of music delivers while acknowledging independent record stores across the country. “It’s got some nice things on it. This is material from the past decade,” Springsteen said. “It’s a nice time to support the record stores, which are dwindling, and get some new music out at the same time.”

These are good times for Springsteen, just coming off introducing the E Street Band at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Brooklyn. His lastest album “High Hopes” met with critical and popular acclaim as the 64-year old rocker continues a world-wide tour that kicked off in Australia at the beginning of 2014 that features another stop at Jazz Fest in New Orleans and is rumored to be adding more tour dates this summer.

A Springsteen show still runs over three hours and he is still playing packed houses full of adoring fans. On top of this The Boss is still as vibrant and necessary an artist as there is on the music scene today as he continues to churn out good music on a consistent basis. With American Beauty, Springsteen adds to his vast catalog hitting the mark again with fans and critic.